Former cop to do time for steroids ring

A North­east res­id­ent and former Phil­adelphia po­lice de­tect­ive was ordered Monday to serve four years in fed­er­al pris­on for or­ches­trat­ing a multi-tiered ster­oids dis­tri­bu­tion ring from his Mod­ena Park home.

Keith Gidel­son, 36, began his sen­tence im­me­di­ately upon the or­der of U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge Paul S. Dia­mond, who also sen­tenced Gidel­son’s wife Kirsten to serve one year of house ar­rest, fol­lowed by two years of pro­ba­tion for as­sist­ing her hus­band in the scheme.

Pro­sec­utors in the case re­portedly asked the judge to im­pose a three-year pris­on sen­tence on Gidel­son, but Dia­mond ex­ceeded even that, stat­ing from the bench, “That [Gidel­son] had served as a po­lice of­ficer makes his fall in­to crimin­al­ity all the more ser­i­ous.”

Gidel­son had pleaded guilty on Oct. 9 to con­spir­acy to dis­trib­ute ana­bol­ic ster­oids, as well as 16 counts of pos­ses­sion with in­tent to dis­trib­ute the drugs. In ex­change for the plea, the U.S. At­tor­ney’s Of­fice with­drew a fire­arms vi­ol­a­tion charge against him.

Au­thor­it­ies claimed that Gidel­son dis­trib­uted thou­sands of doses of ster­oids and hu­man growth hor­mone (HGH) at least from 2009 un­til his April 2011 ar­rest. He re­ceived il­leg­al ship­ments of the con­trolled sub­stances monthly from sup­pli­ers in Europe and China, in­vest­ig­at­ors said. Some ship­ments went to Gidel­son’s home, while oth­ers were sent to a mail­box at a loc­al UPS store.

Gidel­son and his wife stored and pack­aged the products at their home and sold them to a series of cus­tom­ers loc­ally — in­clud­ing oth­er city po­lice of­ficers — and through the mail, au­thor­it­ies said. Many of their cus­tom­ers re-sold the products to oth­er end users, ac­cord­ing to the charges.

Gidel­son re­portedly was in­jured on duty and went on long-term dis­ab­il­ity from the po­lice force in 2009. ••